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Tokens

Fred Miller

    “Hello, Lieutenant, how are you? It’s me, Billy from the 18th, remember? Yeah, it’s been a while, I know.”
    He’s silent, glassy-eyed, his focus on the ceiling above. I pull up a folding chair, slide closer to the bed, and place my cane on the floor.
    “Lieutenant, you recall that kid from the Carolinas who threw up on everybody once our Higgins boat got underway. Hell, just thinking about it makes me wanna gag. What a time that was.”
    His eyes blink, his face pale, his bony frame still. A long tubesnakes down a pole beside the bed and into his mouth. Another weaves an avenue out from the covers and down into a bag beneath his bed.
    “Well, sir, that kid, what was his name? Ross, yeah, Ross was his name. He owns a barbecue restaurant back in Four Oaks, that’s his hometown. Making a go of it, too, I understand. Ross and I, we talk time to time. Sometimes about the landing, sometimes the conditions on the beach that day, but mostly he wants to talk about that firefight up around St. Laurent. Remember that one? Tough going, hedges we didn’t know about, reinforcements on the other side we didn’t expect. Horrendous day. And hell, it’s easy to understand why Ross wants to talk about that day, him being hit twice and losing all that blood. Almost lost him there, too, didn’t we?”
    “Now me, I’d rather talk about that watercraft, the Higgins, and me chocking on cold sea spray up my nose while we waited for God knows what. I remember glancing over my shoulder at those Navy 16 guns coughing smoke and spitting lethal fragments out on our enemies up ahead. And the noise. My lord, that deafening noise. My ears ring just thinking about it. I was plenty scared too, but you know that, Lieutenant, don’t you? I’ve told you enough times, we all were, I guess.”
    A dripping sound echoes from a sink on the wall maintaining a measured pace as I swallow and scramble to think of something else to say.
    “Remember the cockney who steered the boat and tried to turn it around when we ventured into a fusillade of fifty calibers coming at us? Hell, I do, and you sticking your .45 in his mouth and saying, ‘Take us ashore or I’ll blow your f——— head off.’ Remember?”
    “Sometimes I wake up with the sweats hearing those bullets whiz by and ping off the hull of that boat, the lid dropping, and us leaping out into the cold surf hollering and scrambling to get the hell to shore. My, what a day.”
    Outside the wind whips up announcing another crisp autumn morning while rays of sunshine dance across the stark sheets as if ghost pixies have decided to join our party. I pause again to catch a breath of the antiseptic hospital air around me.
    “You know that feeling I had when we reached the beach still grips me time to time, Lieutenant, me wet and shivering and digging a foxhole as if I was expected on the other side of China at any moment. Oh, and you appeared out of nowhere and screamed at all of us, ‘Get the f—— off this beach. You stay here, you die. You get off this beach, you got a chance’. We just stared at you, too stunned to move. About then Margraves bought it, and everyone ducked and buried their faces in the sand while a machine-gun nest up on the ridge strafed our position and moved on. I turned my grit-filled cheek to one side and found myself six inches from Margraves’ face, his eye socket filled with a big hole. I opened my mouth, but before I could utter a word, you yelled at us again over my shoulder, your pistol in the air, ‘You heard me, Get the f—- off this beach’. Well, everybody jumped up started to hustle then. You saved us, you know, Lieutenant.”
    His eyes blink, but there’s more. His hand by his side begins to twitch. Maybe he can hear me after all. Maybe.
    “What a relief when we reached the side of those cliffs; protection we thought. But then the krauts leaned over the top and laid down a hail of bullets. Trouble for them was that we could shoot back.” I laugh. “Once we picked off a couple of ‘em, they stopped shooting.”
    “After the sun disappeared over the ocean, we began to hear groans out on the beach, but hell, we couldn’t move. Damn. I just prayed the sound of the surf might blot out everything else I didn’t want to hear. God help me, it was awful.”
    The wind outside whistles and a crape myrtle raps on the windowpane in earnest as if calling us to formation.
    “Say, I talked to Wally the other day. He doesn’t like to talk about our time over there anymore, but he did tell me about an interesting encounter he had with a general in the National Guard. Yeah, he upped for the Guard for several years after the war. He told me a day came when a general was expected for a formal inspection of the troops. Wally admitted to me he still couldn’t make a uniform look crisp. And you know how he slouched.”
    “Well, he said that general was chewing out every man he confronted in the line. By the time he got to Wally, he must have been exhausted because he just puffed and looked at our friend top to bottom and back, his eyes stopping on the medal around Wally’s neck. The general’s eyes widened, he jumped to attention and saluted Wally. Of course, Wally saluted him back. The general then asked for permission to shake our friend’s hand.”
    “Are you believing that? All these years we could never get him to talk about that medal. But you and I, we were there, we saw what he did. We know he earned it.”
    Behind me, I hear footsteps and turn to see a nurse’s aide with folded sheets in her hands and a smile.
    “I’m here to change his sheets. You can stay if you like,” she says.
    “No’m, I need to be moving along. Hey, Lieutenant, you take care, you hear? I’ll be back before you know it.”
    I move toward the door and look back on this wreckage of life, this friend of mine and unsung hero. I grit my teeth and I recall an adage I once heard, that tokens of valor from real soldiers often lie fallow in those memories and nightmares each takes alone to the grave. I shake my head and saunter out and down the hall to the next door.
    I try to compose myself and peer in at a bone-hard face sunk into a pillow, bandages wrapped around his head and eyes. Clouds of uncertainty grip me as I pause, take another breath, and plunge in.
    “Sidney Steele, pride of the 1st Cav, how the hell are you, bubba?
    Shades of the f——— Hanoi Hilton still around here, I see.”
    A wry smile appears on his lips as I pull up a chair.

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